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Comment by maxrobeyns | Hacker News Reader

My initial reaction to the ad, upon watching it in the launch event was "huh, that's a fun reference to the Hydraulic Press Channel". The slapstick elements (trumpet noise, squishy balls) made it come across as light-hearted, rather than an ominous display of force by a large company crushing artists' tools.

This idea of 'squashing all these tools down to a thin slab of glass' made sense given their somewhat unusual focus on the thinness of the device. It was a bit of a throwback to the early 2010s smartphone innovation, where the size of the devices was the yardstick by which manufacturers would outdo each other. I would charitably interpret it as an uninspired marketing team trying to spin some version of Jobs' classic "the iPhone is simultaneously an iPod, phone and internet device" - however the party trick is old, and nobody's impressed anymore.

Perhaps the blowback is a sign of a wider weariness that people have accumulated towards big tech companies over the past few years, mixed with a nebulous malaise about 'AI' and what it means for the status quo and people's livelihoods.

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This outrage feels so manufactured. I'm a huge basketball fan, coach, ex-player. If they included a basketball in the ad my thought would've been "yeah, you can play NBA2k on it". I'm not mad about the destruction of a single basketball. I don't feel like its disrespect to the game. It's showing that this single device has captured elements of basketball into a small form factor.

As you note this may hint at a larger weariness with big tech -- and I tend to agree. I feel like if it was a public library crushing a bunch of things, and then ends with it lifting up and showing a library card there wouldn't be the same concerns.

Interestingly, basketballs are designed to be as standardized and replaceable as possible (so there’s no question about whether they affected the game.) Whereas musicians do not think of instruments that way. Nor photographers and their cameras, etc. The reaction might be specific to artists. They’re represented on HN, but not as much as non-artists, I bet.

Musicians might not think of their personal instruments in that way, but surely any musician will acknowledge that there exist cheaply made imitations of their instruments that can be treated as more or less disposable. I can get a trumpet on ebay for $60 shipped to my door, and I expect to be able to do whatever I damn please with it, screw what anyone else says.

As a musician, the availability of cheap instruments doesn’t reduce the impact of the symbolism in this ad from my perspective.

It’s not just a question of monetary value or quality, and is more about the implications of the imagery and the resulting questions it raises about the goals of a multi trillion dollar company.

You’re welcome to do whatever you want with your $60 trumpet, and that’s not going to bother me. I see that as orthogonal to the issues with a company of Apple’s size and reach symbolically destroying an entire room full of creative objects while selling to people who are deeply invested in those objects in their own lives.

> a company of Apple’s size and reach symbolically destroying an entire room full of creative objects while selling to people who are deeply invested in those objects in their own lives.

Is it the symbolism that's the is the issue or what's actually been happening for the past 40 years? There's a reason it is called "Garage Band". There's a reason it is called "Paint". Apple isn't investing in the camera tech for the past 15 years so people don't use it. Their ads showing the incredible non-retouched photos with iPhones seems like much more of an attack than this ad.

I think the two go hand in hand, i.e. what's actually been happening for the last 40 years is the context in which this ad was introduced, and the reason the ad feels so bad for many people.

There's a big difference between using product names that align with the analog versions of the tools and symbolically destroying a room full of tools that people often find give them purpose and meaning. It just feels gauche.

> Their ads showing the incredible non-retouched photos with iPhones seems like much more of an attack than this ad.

The difference to me is that one is saying: "look how good our cameras are now, and here's an example of what you can get out of them" and the other is saying "we can just crush this entire room full of tools now because look at this iPad".

I'm not bothered by the camera ads. As a person who carries a camera and loves cameras, the iPhone is a supplement to my kit and the better it gets, the more flexibility I have.

But crushing a shelf full of lenses just makes me cringe.

Definitely their goal is to stop people from playing trumpets and instead play angry birds.

Somebody who worked on this ad probably feels passionately about one of the things which was crushed, and thought it would just be a fun ad. Sure, marketing is their main gig, but they love to get home and throw on some Miles Davis after a long day. They probably never bothered to think too hard about the ramifications of a stupid ad because it’s just their dumb job.

Or maybe they knew 100% what they were doing and it’s evil turtles all the way down.

This means you’re scared a tablet can replace you as a musician. If you have that fear, maybe you should look into it more because from a non musicians perspective, I don’t believe it replaces them, just makes those sounds available to everyone.

Musicians become emotionally attached to instruments that have been with them for a long time. To musicians, instruments feel like they have souls and personalities of their own.

You can do whatever you want with your trumpet but it's not something I'd want to watch.

It has nothing to do with the money.

This is the correct answer. It was taken as an assault on what everyone grew up with and learned their particular trade on (and still may use).

It's also a bad comparison on Apple's part. An ipad is another creative tool and provides a different experience than other methods (like traditional painting). For example, I play acoustic and electric guitar, but also use Ableton. I love my acoustic for the feel and experience, something I can't get in Ableton. I use Ableton for digital composition and sampling, something that's completely different from the feel of strings and how the notes feel through the wood of my acoustic. They are different experiences and usage and purpose.

Okay so don’t watch it? If I buy a $60 trumpet and a $30,000 dollar ad slot, I expect to be able to show whatever I damn please involving my $60 trumpet on my $30,000 ad slot, modulo laws of the land concerning acceptable use of broadcast media. If you are emotionally attached to the $60 trumpet I have used as a prop on my $30,000 ad slot in service of my personal artistic expression: fuck off, I don’t give a a shit, and there’s no reason I should. (Apologies for the crassness, but I really do believe the laws of the land correctly provide us significant rights of “uncouthuness” on public broadcasting channels)

?? I don’t understand this response. People aren’t saying that they shouldn’t have been allowed to run the ad. You seem to be responding as if they were.

People are saying they found the content of the ad objectionable/upsetting.

Is your position that no one should find any ads to be objectionable or upsetting?

What are you arguing here?

Edit: to be clear, I’m not upset with apple over this. I wasn’t upset by the ad (which I haven’t even watched)

My position is that if people find it objectionable (and it’s not actually causing any real harm) they should carry on with their life pretending like it doesn’t exist. This pitchfork army debacle is a load of bologna.

> they should carry on with their life pretending like it doesn’t exist

No, they don't have to listen to you or pretend it doesn't exist. They are perfectly entitled to loudly express their own free speech criticism of Apple's ad or criticism of anything, really.

Creators are also likely one of the biggest market sectors for iPads, so if you were Apple it would do good for your sales to listen to their voices and not offend the people you are trying to sell to.

not parent, the suggestion is to stop being so sensitive. if this is what you worry about then life is pretty damn good for you clearly.

meanwhile parts of the rest of the world are concerned with legitimate matters like being bombed.

Did the ad suggest to you that the iPad was a replacement for cheap, low quality physical objects? That would not be very good copy for Apple. On the contrary, all the instruments etc. seemed rather nice to me. The piano alone was probably worth thousands of dollars.

There is no visual distinction between high and low quality instruments.

I don't know man, there's a ton of immediately observable difference between a $100 Amazon acoustic guitar and a Henkes & Blazer dread...

Those were not real. It’s very clear based on the movement of various items that this is all CG.

Most new pianos are worth thousands of dollars, even entry level ones.

And old pianos are being given away for free on craigslist every day. Even recently restored and tuned vintage baby grands that cost 10s of thousands.

Basketball may be designed like that, but trust me -- hoopers care about their basketballs. There are arguments all the time about the Wilson Evolution vs Baden Elite vs the Spalding TF-1000 vs Wilson EVO. And at AAU games the home team gets to pick the ball -- this is the only advantage they have (since there are no real home arenas) and I've definitely seen teams not be able to shoot because they practice with Evolutions (which are heavier on average) but they play the game with Evos.

Even in college the home team gets to pick the ball (except in situations like tournament play), and players definitely complain about balls (e.g., the Nike balls are horrible).

My point -- almost everyone who cares deeply about an endeavor has strong opinions and ties to their tools (I suspect just as many, if not more, kids sleep with their basketball as they do their musical instrument of choice). My bigger point -- unless Apple came to my house and took the ball out of my bag, I don't really mind that they used a ball which they probably just bought from Amazon.

Yes, a closer analogy would be "look, this guy had a basketball signed by Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant in 1996, and now it's being blown to smithereens and replaced by a 3D model on his iPad".

True but another article I read mentioned Hollywood types being "upset". In what way did the advert hurt them?

Might someone somewhere been rubbed the wrong way? Perhaps. With 8B+ ppl on the planet, anything is possible. But I agree with the post you commented on. That is, the "outrage" felt manufactured. It's been a slow tech news week and perhaps the media was bored and needed some web traffic?

Note: I recently read Kara Swisher's "Burn Book". In a way, entertaining. But when you realize that she - openly and shamelessly subjective to a fault - considers herself a journalist you quickly realize what a cluster fuck that profession has become. Editorial is not journalism. Op-ed is op-ed. We outside The Media shouldn't have to explain the difference to those on the inside.

You can read the Bible on there too. They could have crushed a crucifix.

That's barely hyperbole. The arts are sacred, and big tech is destroying and defiling them.

Maybe I'm even overreacting. But I had tears in my eyes watching it and I assure you my outrage is not manufactured right now.

> If they included a basketball in the ad my thought would've been "yeah, you can play NBA2k on it".

Basketballs are replaceable. They specifically picked objects with nostalgic connections.

Would you feel different if they burned an old high-school jersey, or maybe the one Michael Jordan wore?

I really have to disagree.

I have to acknowledge that there’s probably a pile-on effect from people who enjoy outrage, but a lot of the negative sentiment is coming from level headed musicians and artists; a group that I identify with.

And I wouldn’t say my reaction is rage. It’s closer to a combination of deep disappointment, strong dislike, and a growing feeling that the nebulous worries I’ve felt about tech and its impact on art/music are being made very real.

I don’t find it analogous to a library. Such an ad would imply (to me) some kind of digitization, which frankly is a huge problem at a time when libraries and access to physical books are increasingly under threat.

And I find it different than a basketball, because no one is worried that NBA2K is an actual threat to the game, and basketballs are inexpensive standardized objects.

What they crushed was symbolic of thousands of years of human artistic creativity and output at a time when there’s a lot of anxiety about AI more or less crushing those fields for real.

I like the ad on the whole, but I was a little upset about the destruction of seemed like a perfectly good guitar. I play the guitar as a hobby.

But then again, rock bands have been making me upset by smashing guitars on stage for decades now. And these are the same kind of musicians who are apparently outraged now.

Can sort of understand the discomfort, but musicians have been smashing their own instruments for dramatic effect for a while now.

hmm i thought the guitar was cg

I think it’s the disappointment that Apple is supposed to be on the side of creators and humanity in an era where the arts have been under attack in schools. Apple makes great tools that should complement an artist and their work. It enables a kid who can’t afford an expensive studio to produce their own music. It’s not that it was an outrage machine - it was a population of creatives saying “hey, this feels a little weird”

Apple is 100% engagement farming

but I don't think it was planned they are just capitalizing on the free algorithm marketing by catering to the loud voices on tiktok, x and threads

Look at the replies to the original tweet, it's all as you say completely manufactured outrage. Perpetually-online wannabe influencers with 70 followers talking about how it's "problematic." Maybe it has to do with Big Tech, I don't know but that sounds like it could be it.

Regardless, it's absolutely ridiculous.

I am personally refreshed reading through the comments here and seeing a nuanced, rational response to the ad rather than the manufactured outrage you mentioned.

Lazy journalism is to blame here, as always. Newsrooms have been purged of any talent over the last decade and the only people left are the same "perpetually-online wannabe influencers" you talk about, trawling Twitter for easy stories and rage-clicks. Nobody would have heard or cared about this ad if formerly esteemed publications like NYT weren't running lazy stories about it.

I wasn't outraged, I was disappointed. No manufacturing needed.

"Let's take dozens of objects people enjoy, put them in to a gray featureless factory under a gray featureless industrial press, destroy them in a splash of color, and replace them with a bland featureless grey slab no one really asked for"

And that was my reaction as a loooong-time Apple user.

I understand the intent. The execution is abysmal.

Agree. All this hubbub over nothing. People today are too fragile, enjoy outrage or both.

I disliked the ad. I wasn’t outraged. I take a nuanced view that it was a piece of creative poised to be an impressive addition to Apple’s advertising laurels that missed the mark because its creators failed to account for a growing cultural unease.

Outrage is profitable, it drives engagement, and encouraged by these platforms algorithms. And when everyone sees so much outrage all the time, it normalizes it on the platform so even if you're not seeking income from it, that's the default stance.

People love outrage. Many are not aware of it though.

If you're engaging with it, it's for you.

I think the big thing here is that if you don't have an attachment to any of the items being crushed you probably don't feel as strongly. If you're a trumpet player, seeing a trumpet being crushed is going to be a bit distressing. If you're a photographer, you're putting a monetary value on those lenses being destroyed. If you're into old arcade machines, you're thinking about how many of those cabinets are left in that good of a condition.

AFAICT people are not so much upset about objects of value being destroyed as they are about the symbolism of creative tools being crushed flat and turned into an iPad. For artists and similar creatives, it evokes the way AI companies have already stolen their intellectual property, and their promise to make them all but obsolete in the future.

For me, it’s a mix of both. I’m a musician and a photographer. I felt a visceral negative reaction because those objects are sitting here in my apartment, and I’ve invested thousands of dollars and thousands of hours into them.

I also found the symbolism a bit distressing, because it takes the general worry I’ve felt about AI’s impact on art and music and animates those worries very literally.

Most AI/tech proponents are quick to point out that the original forms of expression aren’t going anywhere. But this felt uncomfortably close to “where we’re going, you won’t need these things anymore”.

And the thing is, I’m a big fan of the iPad and it’s incredibly useful as a companion to these artistic endeavors. But I’m not a fan of the idea that it supersedes them.

Yeah this 100%. Creatives have strong emotional attachments to their tools, especially musicians (whose tools never become obsolete).

Watching a musical instrument get crushed is like watching a pet getting tortured, and it's probably not something non-creatives would understand.

Did you seriously just compare watching a video of a trumpet getting flattened to watching your own pet getting tortured?

Now you know why it rubs musicians the wrong way

I'm a former professional musician. Not being able to tell the difference between your own pet being tortured and an object on tv being destroyed in a commercial would be a severe mental disorder.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7044560/

People have anthropomorphised and attached sentimental value to musical instruments and other artistic instruments since the beginning of civilization. Just because someone writes an academic paper claiming it's a disorder doesn't mean we should care what they have to say.

https://cellomuseum.org/the-photographer-and-the-cellist-doi...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucille_(guitar)

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/feb/20/it-feels-like-...

https://psmag.com/economics/the-benefits-of-bonding-with-a-m...

There's a big difference between "I give my guitar a name" and "Seeing a commercial where a trumpet gets squished is the same as my own pet being tortured".

Let's not pretend you didn't say "Watching a musical instrument get crushed is like watching a pet getting tortured".

This reads like you're accusing somebody of having a mental disorder after failing to understand their metaphor.

A metaphor would be "the boy was a cat as he tip toed quietly through the house".

You're thinking about what reasonable people would say and mean, but these people actually want to say that seeing a trumpet getting flattened in a commercial is the same as watching your own pet be tortured. Why that is, is anyone's guess. Maybe to seem sensitive and deep.

It's a troll and/or GPT. Getting lectured by "CyberDildonics" about attachment to objects is just a little too on the nose. It has to be a joke.

Remember when I predicted that you would attack me and attack 'how I asked' for evidence instead of actually explaining how watching a commercial of a trumpet being mushed is the same as watching your own pet being tortured?

That is what just happened, right on queue.

;)

For me I can't see the symbolism part, but I have serious concerns about destroying that many things and making such a big mess just for one ad. That's just me though.

The arcade one particularly distressing given that arcades and their unique arcade hardware are rapidly vanishing across the world without replacement.

Not to mention a bit rich considering their stance on emulators and game stores.

If tech companies didn't have double standards, they'd have none.

and 32-bit apps that stopped running since catalina.

And the arcades that DO exist are often 90% shitty ticket games that cost $1, have about 15 seconds of gameplay, and then maybe after blowing through $50 you'll have enough tickets to buy $2 worth of Tootsie Rolls and maybe a balsa wood glider. If you got really lucky, maybe a plushie.

Though there are some "barcades" popping up these days that focus on classic arcade games to appeal to older the older crowd.

I happened across a nice one when I was in Denver, recently. It's called Akihabara. Tons of imported Japanese cabinets (including Taiko no Tatsujin and Typing of the Dead), and a bar with imported beers, sake and house cocktails. I wish I'd had a smartcard for saving progress, but it was only something I found out about during the trip.

I'm definitely more into the 90s and early 2000s era of arcade games than 80s stuff (and the seat-friendly JP cabinets are nice) so I enjoyed the opportunity to play games that are hard to find here, and bring back memories of wandering (relatively lackluster) bowling alley arcades with a pocket of quarters.

If ever out in the Denver area again, check out The 1UP Arcade[0]. They have all manner of games, including '80s cabs. Very fun.

[0] https://the1uparcadebar.com/

Typing of the dead! Ask me how I learned touch typing in anger. Such a beautiful piece of hijacked game.

Much, much love to anyone who worked on this gem, or work to preserve it.

There's a chain of arcades called Round1 that also specializes in Japanese games, mostly music games. They're all over the USA, including Denver.

It was a mini arcade box which are sold by a variety of companies with any number of real arcade games using modern hardware in them for under $300.

I can't find any existence for the game "Space Imploders" though.

Nobody went out and bought a vintage arcade game with "unique arcade hardware." It's almost certainly plywood and an old monitor.

People didn't even notice that it was "space imploders" lol. They were too busy being outraged.

Contemporary arcade cabinets featured similar hardware to the original Macs.

Nearly all modern arcade cabinets just have regular PCs in them.

Right. That has essentially always been the case.

I understand that there is an entire culture surrounding these machines and that people enjoy collecting and restoring them. Hell, I would even like to build a cabinet myself one day.

But there's a reason they are disappearing. They're old and obsolete. While they may have value to a niche group, they are overall viewed as mostly worthless.

Secondly, there's a very simple solution to disliking what someone else does with their own property. Purchase it before they do whatever you dislike. Either from them or by beating them to the punch and buying it from the previous owner before they do.

> Secondly, there's a very simple solution to disliking what someone else does with their own property. Purchase it before they do whatever you dislike. Either from them or by beating them to the punch and buying it from the previous owner before they do

I think this kind of sums up why it was a bad ad.

"Don't be mad, you could have just outbid me" isn't a great thing to have to be saying at the same time you're asking the same person to get hyped about a new product.

The Gutenberg bible is also old and obsolete. The pyramids at Giza are old and obsolete. Stonehenge is old and obsolete. Ancient cave paintings are old and obsolete. The Wright brothers' flyer is old and obsolete.

> They're old and obsolete. While they may have value to a niche group, they are overall viewed as mostly worthless.

Old and obsolete doesn't mean worthless, if people are collecting them and spending a lot of money on them then they're not worthless.

Most of the reason that collectors have to spend a lot of money on arcade cabinets, though, is not that they have high market resale value; but rather that the machines they can manage to acquire are usually in terrible condition, requiring large amounts of conservation work to get working and presentable again. And they’re so broken down, because everyone but these few collectors have valued — and continue to value — these machines so little that they’ve allowed them to rot in warehouses for decades. Many arcade cabinets are recovered from e-waste recycling centers, or even landfill.

If they truly had market value, then people other than the collectors themselves would be making a business out of finding and restoring these cabinets, in order to sell them to the collectors. But no such business exists — because there just isn’t the demand to sustain it.

I’m reminded of a recent YouTube video about MadCatz gaming peripherals. The video’s author had to spend thousands of dollars buying the few remaining controllers on the used market to use as examples. Why so much? Not because of high demand. Because of limited supply — they were so valueless (mainly due to just being awful products even when new) that every owner of one had long thrown in away; no gaming store wanted to buy any used (being seen selling such brands was a mark against the quality of a store!); and even thrift stores had long dumped them for lack of interest. These gamepads and flight-sticks had value to this one guy making this one video — but literally nobody else.

A one-time purchase, does not a market-clearing price make. The market is still just as illiquid after such a purchase as before it.

> Why so much? Not because of high demand. Because of limited supply

Eh, "high demand" is meaningless on its own in this case. There's high demand relative to the supply.

And not everyone recognizes value in an old cabinet and throw theirs out (further reducing supply), but that just means the market isn't efficient, but that's true of the market for most things.

> They're old and obsolete

Just like that iPad will be in a couple of years.

Your "solution" is so unrealistic for all but the very wealthiest people that it's on the verge of seeming disingenuous. My bank account would have to be quite a few orders of magnitude larger for me to be able to purchase even a fraction of all the things in the world I would like to preserve.

I was so angered by your opinion on relics being worthless that I checked your comments and you seem alright in other respects. I do like HN for this reason. So yeah I disagree with you this time but I’m not going to be rude

The console says “Space Imploder,” which isn’t a real arcade console, from what I can tell. There’s more discussion here[1], but it seems likely that a lot of the things weren’t real (or if they were real, they weren’t were junk that was broken beyond repair).

This seems to be a major point that’s missing from the discussion. If a lot of this is stuff that was fake or already headed for the dump, it completely undermines the argument that perfectly good equipment was destroyed.

[1] https://vi-control.net/community/threads/apple-destroys-vint...

The point isn't how it was produced, but what the message is. And the message is destruction of creative instruments is good, akshually, because shiny & thin.

No amount of "but we only rendered it" is going to fix it. It speaks about values the company holds.

[x] Strongly Agree.

Also, the focus on how these devices are increasingly consumer only instead of me being able to use my device to create

Disclaimer: one of my goals is to build apps for my machine on the machine itself. I had this working on the now defunct Firefox phone OS (Its apps were deployed as Zipped HTML/JS and related resources -- I cobbled together a dev environ out of a few browser based tools).

TL;DR: I'm a tool-using creator-type species, The modern "CONSUME ONLY" device craze makes my eye twitch; Ads that reinforce destruction of tools make me want to join fight club.

Man, you touched on something that has been a sore point for me my entire smart phone owning part of my life. The inability to make a simple program without huge hurdles, just for my phone and no one else.

Having a locked down tool that is so dumbed down is annoying. For example, I'd love to make a custom unit converter so that I can quickly and unobtrusively convert between metric and imperial without being online/etc. that also displays the answer with closest drill size

This reminds me of an article from Maddox in 2007 about how the Nokia E70 is better than the iPhone because he can use the terminal on it. [0] Time may have proven him right.

[0]http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=iphone

Art creation is creation. Muic, images, video -- they all benefit from good screens, fast processors, quality stylus integration, first party apps, and full-stack attention to latency. The iPad is about creation, just not your type of creation.

Why would you need that when for the low price of 25 quarters a month, you could have Apple Arcade(TM)? /s

So if you own a house or car then it's distressing to see one destroyed in a movie? Both of those cost much more than a trumpet, and for many people are more personal and unique, but somehow most people manage to keep their eyes on the screen.

Depending on the context, probably? During my suspension of disbelief of the narrative, it might make me say "I don't like this destruction!" and to root for whatever might be mitigating the destruction

Honestly, outside the context of a movie or education, I find it pretty off-putting altogether. The videos of brand new cell phones being destroyed, TV's kind of less so but still, cars being crushed or vandalized, etc. If I put my psychoanalysis hat on (always dangerous when your subject is yourself, but anyway) I feel two big things:

1. A part of me just does not like waste. I'm keenly aware of our rampant consumerist culture's slow and continuing march towards collapsing our biosphere, and one of the ways those thoughts manifest themselves is being really upset with people buying products simply to turn right around and destroy them, while barely using them, usually for profit in the attention economy but sometimes seemingly just because they're wealthy and bored.

2. And another part: growing up poor, I'm keenly aware of how valuable things can be for people like me, who didn't grow up with much. Maybe that old computer that works fine that you're going to run tannerite through for a YouTube video means nothing to you, but I vividly recall many points in my life I could've really used it, and I know I'm the absolute opposite of alone in that fact.

The "artistic" angle that a lot of the outrage this is drawing didn't really hit me as hard as these things did, but that's just my subjective experience. I respect people who love these beautiful things and don't want to see (probably) completely functional, or even repairable, useful things destroyed so a multi-billion dollar company can sell more products. (And let's be honest, given the nature of video production, the ones we actually saw destroyed were likely a fraction of the ones actually destroyed.)

The artistic angle I do understand though is if it's done for something like a movie, it doesn't hit the same for me. When it's done to make other kinds of art, even schlocky hollywood crap art, at least that has... a result, I guess? It's destruction to create something. This was destruction for... another fucking ad. That will be forgotten in probably 2 weeks.

Edit: The more I've thought about it, the more gross it feels, and I find myself really sympathizing. Times are pretty tough right now and artists have it rough during good times. How would you feel if you, as a piano player, who hadn't gotten to play in years (or maybe even ever!) on a piano like that, how would you feel seeing Apple buy one that at least looks to be in perfectly good working order, and smash it, in the service of selling you a stupid iPad? I really think this is impossible to comprehend without taking into account that everyone is hurting right now: inflation, Bidenomics, whatever it is you want to call it: people are broke, our expenses are going up, and our salaries remain the same. Yeah, I totally understand why this ad in this cultural moment hit a nerve: a whole ton of people, especially creatives, are struggling right now and here's Apple, buying up a ton of awesome things, and smashing em to bits and being like "here, you don't need a piano, you need an iPad!" Yeah, no shit people are upset.

> usually for profit in the attention economy

I remember Obama's "Cash for Clunkers" program where people were paid to pour sand in engines and run them to destruction.

This was all supposedly in the service of replacing them with more fuel efficient cars. The trouble was the numbers weren't run. To equal the emissions from manufacturing a car, a car would have to be driven 20,000 miles. One can easily see that the increase in fuel economy didn't add up.

Then there was the "create new jobs" fallacious reasoning, akin to the broken window fallacy.

Not all emissions regs are for the climate e.g. air quality improves today when someone upgrades their car regardless of the CO2 emissions

I remember once watching some heist movie while recovering from a motorcycle crash, and the sight of all the faceless mooks crashing their bikes during its car chase scene was so viscerally uncomfortable that it took all the fun out of the spectacle. This had never been a problem before.

> So if you own a house or car then it's distressing to see one destroyed in a movie?

I think there's a difference between showing items getting damaged as a depiction of some sort of chaos or violence versus lauding it as being obsoleted by technical progress.

That's because the blown up car is not advertising anything.

Instead, imagine an ad extolling the virtues of public transport by blowing up cars in a parking lot. It sends the complete opposite message than what was probably intended.

Yeah, it feels like the replacement is the issue, not necessarily the destruction.

I don't want to just program a song on an iPad. I would like to perform it on a piano, which means I can't crush my piano and replace it with an iPad.

Yeah, I do a lot of live recording from my piano to Mac and I was thinking the same thing.

But maybe the ad is saying - you're no longer programming a MIDI track, the AI piano player in Garage Band or whatever is just going to be indistinguishable from a real piano.

I wasn't initially bothered by it, but I think the people who are have a fair point especially about the generative AI implications of replacing real creative tools.

Yeah I don't care how good the AI is, it's not the same as the experience of playing a real instrument. It's taking away someone's creative experience and replacing it with a synthetic version. Even if the result is higher quality artistic output it eliminates the process of producing it which should not be discounted.

If I saw a house, that looked like the one where I grew up, being cheerfully destroyed to build a Walmart parking lot, yes I might get a little distressed. It would certainly not improve my opinion of Walmart.

I don't like "Dukes of Hazzard" because they destroyed and crushed at least one '69 Dodge Charger per episode.

if a car is like a tool that you tolerate in order to get to work, then no, you might even enjoy the recording of the enactment of a revenge fantasy you can't afford

if you spend your weekends polishing your car, buying aftermarket addons for it, modifying it, and/or considering which car to save up for next, then yeah, it's gonna fucking hurt if you watch a movie and see them blow up a car like the one you long for, especially if you think they did it for real instead of using cgi. and that's true whether that car is a lamborghini countach or a low rider

https://www.military.com/off-duty/why-us-troops-blew-uday-hu...

Option 1: destroy something for a 30 second ad that near nobody will look at in 10 years

Option 2: destroy something for a movie that gets regarded as a classic and people watch for decades

If you own a 1965 Bugatti because you absolutely love it, and that's what's getting crushed? Yeah, probably.

Not a movie. If it was an ad trying to sell me something that was going to replace my house, that would be closer.

This comparison falls wildly short and completely misses OP's point.

Many people own cars, but only a small number of people are deeply into cars, and for one of those people I can definitely see a vintage car getting destroyed on screen causing a negative emotional reaction.

Many people own homes, but it's their own home that they get really attached to, not the abstract concept of a home.

My wife is a lifelong, fervent string musician and I have been with her in a film where she shouted out in pain when a string instrument was brutally destroyed. OP is talking about having that kind of attachment to an artform, not about causal ownership of objects.

I don’t think it is healthy if you are emotionally distressed seeing a trumpet being crushed.

It depends on the context. On an entertainment yt channel, one single real trumpet, so what. But the context apple produced is the implication that the very concept of a trumpet is being destroyed and replaced with a thin, temporary simulacrum.

The difference is subtle. In the first case, a single real trumpet. Only worth a few hundred bucks. In the advertisement, the crushed trumpet is a symbol representing everything around trumpets: lessons, spit valves, centuries/milennia of history, inherited instruments, afternoons afterschool marching around on a football field with childhood friends.

Ce n'est pas une pipe.

> I don’t think it is healthy if you are emotionally distressed seeing a trumpet being crushed.

My first thought was the exact opposite: watching the specific ad without being distressed, shows an emotionally damaged human being. Especially the last part where the toy gets crashed screaming is really messed up.

Agreed. I don’t understand the reaction at all. Your favorite trumpet getting crushed in front of you? Yeah sure that might be distressing.

But a generic virtual facsimile on a video? That’s silly

Wait are you sure the whole thing was an animation? It's hard to tell but at least some of it looks real... Is that mentioned in the article?

I would guess that if it is a real trumpet the props department went down to the local used instrument store and picked up the cheapest Yamaha in the discount bin. But, the way the trumpet crumples doesn't quite look realistic to me.

I know it's actually hard to tell. There's definitely some CGI in there. But a lot of it looks pretty real too. But the issue with it was the destruction of all of the creative tools. So it's in some ways not quite as bad if it's not real.

> animation

I'm betting mostly CGI actually.

Some bits are obviously physically impossible, so definitely CGI.

I can be persuaded that some shots are real+CGI, and squished into the larger CGI view. They might have crushed a few "things" to see how they would fail, and then CGI'ed up a final version.

The wide shots do not look real. The lighting is not believable. The failure modes of many individual items are not believable. The whole pancaking effect of the big crush is not believable.

I understand the discomfort at seeing wanton destruction. It bothers me to see great old houses or cars get wrecked for movies, for example.

Nowadays, most of that is fake.

And I think almost all of this ad is fake as well.

Even if it is a cheap one, it's still wrong. I have the same visceral gut reaction to seeing a musical instrument get destroyed as I do to seeing a book burnt. I own a lot of very expensive, very nice instruments. However, some of my favourite music I have created has been on dirt cheap charity shop instruments.

It's just the shear waste of it all that strikes me. Like so many of those things cost so much money to the people that could use or want them. So many high-paid tech workers are already out-of-touch with what most people consider affordable that I'm not surprised their marketing team thought this was ok.

But most artists are starving, and we live in a world where waste like this isn't really morally acceptable.

A virtual facsimile of destruction can still elicit an emotional response. Ever heard of "Happy Tree Friends"?

It's like a dog whistle. People who care about this are not unhealthy, they are having a visceral reaction to something that you don't understand the significance of. Try curiosity instead of dismissiveness.

You’ve probably never invested hundreds or thousands of hours in a hobby, art form, craft or skill. If you had, you would find the ad at least mildly disconcerting.

If you don’t see how, maybe it’s time to get off the screen? Stop consuming and try creating for a bit?

I don't think it's healthy to have so little perception or understanding and think think everything is that simple.

No one is traumatized. It's just unappealing and tone-deaf that's all. Showing a harmless little toy head and face getting squished and then popped, and presenting that as cool and fun and good, just makes you wonder about the person who produced that imagery and thought it could possibly have those associations, that's all.

Showing a bunch of mixed colors of paint oozing down the side of something is not "emotionally distressing", it's just unappealing, especially to Apple product customers, who buy Apple products precicely because they are sleek and minimalist and clean. Steve's & Ive's entire universe was clean & sterile.

It's remarkable because Apple are supposed to be the KINGS of exactly those sorts of intangible things like impression & subconscious reaction, where things like a 0.1mm or 0.1degree difference in a shape actually matters.

> Showing a bunch of mixed colors of paint oozing down the side of something is not "emotionally distressing", it's just unappealing, especially to Apple product customers, who buy Apple products precicely because they are sleek and minimalist and clean. Steve's & Ive's entire universe was clean & sterile.

For me it was a different reaction: They literally replaced a bunch of colors with grayness. In a gray factory. Under a gray slab.

This is very different from what Apple used to mean and advertise.

Apple has become the bad guys in the 1984 ad that they railed against back then. It's really a 180 degree difference.

In stead of "think different", this ad seems to suggest "think the same - get rid of your individuality and skills and just get an iPad instead".

If not to invoke an emotional response what was the point of the ad?

"We squeezed all this functionality into this one device"? That doesn't sound that hard to understand.

No wonder everyone on this site complains about loneliness and therapy and this and that. Most humans aren't 'distressed' by this stuff. I always did wonder about the oddly neurotic opinions expressed here. Now it makes sense: people have little to no emotional resilience here. Everything is the end of the world.

I'd say that's a first world thing for the generation that grew up on SSRIs and the pathologization and medical treatment of every negative emotion from grief to mild discomfort. Not specifically a HN problem.

But they didn't actually squeeze all that functionality into a cold piece of glass, plastic, and silicon. They're only suggesting that you see it that way and to give them your money instead of buying and learning to play an instrument.

I mean, I guess just having an iPad can get you laid somehow these days in the very stupid world we live in, but the guys in the band with actual musical skills are probably getting way more action.

I guess you don't understand advertising. Emotional response is a common theme. Consider Honda's continuous "Dream" series of ads. If you think everyone is a snowflake you aren't enlightened, you're just very bad at sales.

Then hopefully you won't feel emotionally distressed when queer automated communism comes and crushes capitalism, uwu

Hopefully you'll help!

Agreed. Wondering how many of those things were real and got crushed was distressing.

The worst part was that you can have a super effective ad simply by reversing the video.

Everything now springs out of the iPad and nobody is thinking about whether anything got crushed.

"Space Imploder" is not a real arcade game. That looked like one of those cheap mini arcade boxes you can buy brand new from a variety of sources.

I see a bunch of cheap knock offs being crushed but I cannot say all of the items were.

The entire ad is a symbol for Apple's iPad replacing everything being crushed. It's not "Space Imploder", it's every single arcade game every made. It's a representative for arcade games in general. Nobody should take "Space Imploder" literally. They can't use "Space Invaders" likely because of copyright, but I'm sure that they would have in this ad if they could have just so that someone wouldn't end up missing the point and suggesting "but, Space Imploder doesn't even exist".

I'm a trumpet player, professionally. I don't give a rats *ss about it. Everyone just wants to get upset about something, is how i see it.

You mean the arcade cabinet that conveniently switches to a GAME OVER screen while it has sparks flying and smoke pouring out of it when it gets hit by the crusher? Somehow I doubt you lost an actual cabinet. I'll be surprised if it's even made out of wood and not polygons.

Was the entire ad CGI? I cannot tell anymore. I find it unlikely they built a gigantic hydraulic crusher just for the ad.

It's possible that some of the close-ups are practical, but the wide shots, such as when the cabinet is being crushed, look fake and plastic as hell. And quite a lot of the destruction is super dramatic, whereas real objects under real hydraulic presses are way less so.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJrE4nxDsSw

Quite a lot less sparkles, smoke and explosions than the ad.

> If you're a trumpet player, seeing a trumpet being crushed is going to be a bit distressing

Really? I play the trumpet and felt nothing watching this ad. My trumpet wasn't being crushed, so who cares? It wasn't a rare Stradivarius, nor even a high-end Schilke or anything... Even if it was - why care? They can make more trumpets after all...

It's not your personal trumpet that is getting smashed.

The clear meaning I got from the ad was: we want to destroy everything and make you buy our product instead.

I know that wasn't what they were going for (I'm pretty sure, anyway), but it's very hard for me to interpret it differently.

I never connected it to the hydraulic press channel at all for some reason.

You either get the symbolism of "let's crush all remaining vestiges of creative culture" or you don't.

If you don't, that's fine. Policing the extent of people's reactions doesn't make for constructive conversation, and, ironically, is merely a different form of "over-reaction."

> You either get the symbolism of "let's crush all remaining vestiges of creative culture" or you don't.

Correction: you either choose to believe that's the symbolism, or you don't.

I "get" it, intellectually, but I don't think that was the intent of the advertiser, nor do I think it's the obvious interpretation of the ad. The obvious interpretation, to me, was "hey, we can piggyback on this hydraulic press channel meme and sell iPads!"

Tellingly, few people care that the hydraulic press channel exists, despite actually crushing all sorts of stuff [1]. See also: the viral "does it blend?" ads [2], and any number of music videos or performances where instruments are destroyed [3] (practically a meme unto itself), etc.

[1] including instruments (listen to the guitar 'scream' under the press!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsQOKKE7UbM

[2] they blended a skeleton! oh, the symbolism! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsTZm7QtY84

[3] boom go the guitars (this, apparently, was not the one moment that mattered): https://youtu.be/QvW61K2s0tA?feature=shared&t=175

The intent behind media matters but isn't all that matters. How people might interpret something is important (albeit often unpredictable).

I think the symbolism of "let's crush all remaining vestiges of creative culture" is a pretty obvious _potential_ interpretation from a _non-trivial amount_ of people. In that sense it is an interpretation that matters for our present discourse, even if it isn't the interpretation that the creator of the ad intended.

> How people might interpret something is important (albeit often unpredictable).

It's a big world out there. There are literally billions of possible ways that people can interpret whatever you put out in the ether, and many of them are...precious...to the extreme. Worry too much what any one of them is going to think, and you won't do anything.

The obvious conclusion, to quote every influencer on the internet, is: "Haters gonna hate", but admittedly, I don't work in Apple PR.

I don't think the ad intend this messaging. I do think it unfortunately parallels what many advocates of AI do believe, strongly. And that's what people are reacting to.

I think the ad is a bit a Rorschach test. Most people see a butterfly. Others see man violently stabbing a bicycle, and that says more about them than the creators of the ad.

basically agreed, except I think that the latter group is 90% comprised of people who see an opportunity for performative angst and/or attacking Apple.

Or, you know, _only_ seeing the butterfly and then being dismissive about other interpretations, maybe people who do that also have things revealed about them. ;)

I find it incredibly hard to believe they had no idea what message they could be sending. Everything reacts to its destruction. They choreographed the final moments of each prop to show pain.

The hydraulic press channel does not do that. Their videos convey enthusiasm and sheer glee.

The fact, the add went through a considerable amount of people and no one raised a red flag tells you all you need to know about the industry.

Maybe you can go into that more. Where's that intuition coming from that tells you "Apple wants to destroy everything"?

If you are already weary of too many screens; and you find a world with more physical objects less bleak.

It's not so much that Apple "wants to destroy everything". It's just that they care more about the digital world than the real world. This is the same intuition that makes people weary of virtual reality.

See also this image of Steve Jobs' office vs Tim Cook's: https://www.instagram.com/starworldlab/p/C5TRLqAujPJ/

It's in the context of how the FAANG segment of the tech industry has become overbearing and is cheerfully destroying all sorts of great things in order to replace them with more tech.

It's not really about Apple specifically, but more that the ad is graphically illustrating something that already seemed to be all too true.

At least I know now what HP channel means, I was wondering how Hewlett Packard was involved in all of this… I‘m getting old…

Yes, that was what the ad depicted but obviously that was not the meaning of the ad. The ad was a metaphor.

It's simply uncomfortable to see a lot of valuable creative tools being slowly destroyed for no reason, especially a piano. I'm not even thinking about the symbolism.

I thought it was obvious that the entire ad is CGI. Nothing really breaks how it would. When the top of the piano breaks, all the dampers magically fall off.

Making that ad with CGI would be way more expensive than buying the real objects.

Maybe so, but decisions aren't based only on what's cheapest. A lot of the objects destruct in a way that's more exciting than how they'd compress in reality.

ironically enough, the use of CGI replaces the need/demand for real instruments in making this ad just like how AI is replacing the need/demand for real instruments in creative industries

Wait until you see what goes on at the county landfill.

It happens, and maybe the ad was just CGI, but it doesn't mean I enjoy watching it. Like, the Burger King ads don't show a cow being butchered.

I picked up on the context of all the human experiences we perceive as wrapped up in those items - as sorts of resiviors for human emotion and symbols of self actualization. I think a more apt analogy would be: you wouldn't host an estate sale at the site of that person's funeral.

Given Apple's standards, it's impossible to imagine them crushing a piano in real-life and having it come apart on film in just the way they wanted.

The camera zooms in a lot on certain objects coming apart, so maybe they animated or even re-shot select parts of it, but the overall thing was real?

And then the burger being thrown away.

With "old Macdonald" playing in the background, and disclaimer at the end that the cow was CGI

I feel like I would appreciate an ad where they crushed landfill waste into an iPad.

It reminded me of the old Game Boy Pocket commercials:

https://youtu.be/qzAo9HzOgtQ

https://youtu.be/CWh_6jutU7M

That first one is pretty on point and hilarious in comparison

If my metronome app stops complying with iOS developer guidelines, it will stop working or Apple will pull it. This doesn’t happen to a real dedicated metronome. The App Store is a problem for iPad. Developers need the freedom to develop solutions for iPad without Apple constantly breaking their APIs or introducing new standards. Otherwise nothing on iPad is timeless.

> It was a bit of a throwback to the early 2010s smartphone innovation

It was also a throwback to the original iPhone announcement bringing all these separate functions into one.

How much of a blowback was that really anyway? I mean a social media headline that a few others pile on... is rather limited as a blowback.

If anything both ad idea and implementation are mediocre - and perhaps should have been rejected on that account. This is indeed Youtube shorts stuff. And someone pointed out the exact same ad idea from LG 15 years ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcUAQ2i5Tfo with even more musical instruments.

It depends if it sticks in the cultural memory. Their 1984 ad has been immortalized. And, “Hi, I’m a Mac. And I’m a PC.” Ads can have lasting impact.

> Perhaps the blowback is a sign of a wider weariness that people have accumulated towards big tech companies over the past few years, mixed with a nebulous malaise about 'AI' and what it means for the status quo and people's livelihoods.

I think you hit it on the head. It's not so much anger about seeing a piano or a trumpet get crushed but more about the symbolism of it. Which, I think is definitely tone deaf on Apple's part.

The fact is, artists, developers and many people from all walks of life are terrified of what AI will mean for their jobs and their livelihood, and also, afraid that it cheapens everything they've spent all their life learning and mastering.

There's definitely a lot of pent up fear and/or hatred for it bubbling at the surface for many people and this commercial just kind triggers those feelings.

It's also from Apple's long-time core audience. I'm not sure how people don't understand this, other than maybe they've forgotten the roots of Apple's comeback.

I think everyone is overly negative around the world for a variety of reasons

COVID hangover, war, elections, food prices

That news & social media is significantly negative and designed to induce and promote rage, that's the crux of this issue

I am not a musician or photographer, but I see the emotional value of those extremely well crafted and often beloved objects.

I create software, mostly, but I practice woodworking as a hobby, and I can tell how difficult it is to build a piano or any kind of musical instrument.

I found the ad extremely distasteful, enough to trigger mild nausea.

I see the point they were trying to make, but it is both dumb and old, and frankly nobody asked for a thinner iPad.

The most annoying part is that _they_ did not feel what countless people saw and felt, they are too disconnected from their audience.

The outrage is not made up, some of us felt it in our bones, I understand that we don't all share the same sensitivity, but you can't simply brush it off as if this was somewhat orchestrated or theatre.

Spot on. An iPad won't last long enough to become some omes beloved object.

My initial reaction was the opposite — “wow they are kind of late to the hydraulic press channel hype. That’s odd.”

For a company that has always prided itself on having strong marketing chops, this felt out of character. And perhaps a sign of the general change in culture and standards at Apple.

Exactly. It's not only the creative artists who are opposing, although that's what this ad targets; a lot of others not in big tech are also very displeased with where things are going. The sentiment of this resistance can be summed up in two short sentences: "You will not replace us. Machines will not replace us."

I saw the ad as trying to draw an equivalence between the iPad and all of those creative tools, as if owning an iPad is equivalent, or even better, than owning those objects. This is a lie, a deception, and apart from lamenting the loss of so many wonderful objects the lie of it is what really sticks in my craw.

It made me cringe, but only because I saw it after hearing about the controversy. It made me wonder whether I'd have had the same reaction if I just saw it "fresh".

I think this is exactly correct:

“Perhaps the blowback is a sign of a wider weariness that people have accumulated towards big tech companies over the past few years, mixed with a nebulous malaise about 'AI' and what it means for the status quo and people's livelihoods.”

To the former point, I think it was Doctorow that coined the term “enshittification”.

To be fair to Big Tech, they’re not any worse than healthcare companies, or airlines, or any of the countless (sometimes it seems basically all) corporations that have been steadily turning the crank on making the modern experience a little worse every year for typical people (I’m not interested in silly summary statistics like per-capita GDP or the CPI, those are gamed to hell: give me an arithmetic mean and I’ll give you a corrupt system).

It’s that so recently they were so much better. When I joined a FAANG in 2011 I had no issue wearing company gear around. People would be like: “that’s awesome I use that every day it’s great”. By 2018 I was lying in coffee shops and bars about what I did for a living (one of the main reasons I left).

Regarding AI broadly construed, it could be used as a wildly powerful tool for leveling the playing field, the way Google was when it appeared. It’s in the hopes of realizing that outcome that I work on it and am so vocally critical of those who just trivially don’t want that.

But it could also become the greatest tool for oppression since the firearm, and I think the public is starting to get wise to the fact this is unfortunately the path we’re on.

It’s trite, but I always come back to this: when the robots are finally capable of doing all the work, do we get Star Trek TNG or Blade Runner.

The technology is a step in either direction depending on how it’s used and regulated.

Yeah — I liked it in general. But can completely see why artists would hate the concept of a giant weight crushing the artistic object that has fueled their life-long obsessions.

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